One of the most important pronouncements that Ross wrote in his original prospectus for The New Yorker was “It will hate bunk.” That last word was one that Gibbs would frequently use in his own copy. Reviewing William Saroyan’s The Beautiful People, he summed up by calling it a play “which I strongly suspect of being largely the bunk.” For Ross and his crew, any sort of soft-pedaling of the truth as an informed author saw it was anathema to honest journalism.
The attitude was most clearly expressed in the magazine’s reviews. Edmund Wilson was a case in point. He came to The New Yorker after a stellar career at The New Republic and with a reputation for producing such solidly reported, solidly written book-length sociological and historical works as The American Jitters and To the Finland Station. Failing to persuade Ross to establish a purely literary journal with himself, Wilson, as editor, he was instead offered the post of book critic, replacing Clifton Fadiman. Wilson got an office, a secretary, $10,000 a year, and $3,000 for expenses; in return, The New Yorker could boast some of the best literary cachet in the country.
Wilson’s work was perceptive, deeply intelligent, authoritative, and exceptionally well crafted. It could also be devastating. He hated hackwork; he dismissed the novel The Turquoise by Anya Seton as being “as arbitrary, as basically cold and dead, as a scenario for a film” and “arid rubbish, which has not even the rankness of the juicier trash.” Frequently, the object of his venom didn’t even have to be incompetent. “It has happened to me from time to time to run into some person of taste who tells me that I ought to take Somerset Maugham seriously,” he wrote, “yet I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate.” He considered the breathless reception of Maugham’s presentation of the original Of Human Bondage manuscript to the Library of Congress “a conspicuous sign of the general decline of our standards.”
Another leading practitioner of the critical put-down was Lois Long. Her “On and Off the Avenue” column covered not only fashion and style but all manner of related subjects with assessments that were often scathing. She dismissed a certain Coty hand lotion as “nothing but rose water and glycerin with a little milk.” When a promoter sent her a tchotchke called “Pair o’ Lipstick,” she told Ross, “It’s lousy and silly, just one of those stunt ideas. Seeing as how I get about twenty-five bottles and jars and junk a week, I have gotten used to trying them out in my own good time.”
Occasionally, Long went too far. She once angered Elizabeth Arden with an impending item about how the cosmetician ostensibly served grapefruit juice to her patrons as a beauty aid. Arden’s attorneys insisted that she did no such thing and threatened to bring action if the paragraphs were published. Ross, who had privately warned Long, “Your emotions must not destroy your conscience and your conscientiousness,” turned the item over to White. He recast it in a more innocuous form in “Comment.”
It was an appropriate move. As White and Thurber had demonstrated amply in “Comment” and “Talk,” The New Yorker derived much of its form from its special brand of elegant arrogance. In time, this poise would permeate the entire magazine. A typical example was a two-part Profile by Matthew Josephson of the banker Leon Fraser. The opening paragraph set the tone:
Leon Fraser is one of New York’s few cases of successful reincarnation. Today president of the classically conservative First National Bank of Wall Street, he began his adult life, while a student and a member of the faculty at Columbia University, as what is now called a liberal and in those days was called, usually within quotation marks, a radical. Along with other members of the Morningside Heights intelligentsia, he used to think that bankers were vulgar. His own ambitions were vaguely literary; he wrote a number of highly unmarketable short stories and did occasional book reviews for the World. In addition, he was strenuously interested in political theory including the theory that something might be the matter with capitalism. As a young political-science instructor, he belonged to the impractical, somewhat threadbare element which was intent on making the world over. His companions were men like the progressive Professor Charles A. Beard; Professor Carlton J. Hayes, who was then practically a Socialist; and Joseph Freeman, who was warming up to become editor of the New Masses. Late in the fall of 1916, several months before the United States entered the first World War, Fraser acquired the reputation of being one of Columbia’s more vocal pacifists, and as a result was eventually eased off the faculty.
This sort of approach—simultaneously impressed, bemused, patronizing, and informed—was unique. As an anonymous New Yorker editor told an annoyed reader, “We seldom make idols of our subjects.”
That operating philosophy was bound to rankle. Even some contributors were not entirely comfortable with the magazine’s posture. Frank Sullivan once confided to White:
I think I may have bothered Ross and Gibbs today. I hope so. This is strictly between ourselves, but I saw them both at Muriel King’s [the] night before last, and listened to them talk for an hour or so, and believe it or not, my dears, they didn’t approve of one single g.d. thing that was mentioned. Really, I wish they could have got a perspective on themselves, and how they sounded. Not unlike a ladies sewing circle composed mainly of virgins, elderly and involuntary virgins. . . . I asked them to try not to be so god damn [sic] supercilious, for the sake of their own mental health, and suggested that theirs was the attitude of a couple of callow sub-editors from the Harvard Lampoon.
In putting down everything within sight, Ross may not have exactly been endearing. Nor might he be considered wholly objective. Still, he hated bunk as he saw it, and he tried to combat it through trenchant writing. His bullheaded bluntness would lead him and his crew into innumerable conflicts.
One of these arose with the publication of a Profile of the New York Mirror gossip columnist and radio fixture Walter Winchell. Written by St. Clair McKelway, it ran in a staggering six parts from June 15 through July 20, 1940. Winchell, an admirer of The New Yorker, had had no idea that what Ross and McKelway had in mind was not merely a Profile of a colorful personality but a condemnation of the whole gossip industry, as evidenced by the man who was arguably its most prominent practitioner. He had therefore agreed to be interviewed. “I had an unexpectedly long and free talk with Winchell last night,” McKelway told his legman on the Profile, John Bainbridge, late in 1939. “He is all for the piece, and apparently is prepared to talk his head off as soon as I am prepared to listen.”
Winchell did indeed talk his head off to McKelway over the ensuing months. In the meantime, Bainbridge dug into the tiresome task of determining the accuracy of his reportage. Aided by his wife, he did so through semiscientific means, taking as a sampling Winchell’s five Monday columns for the month of April. There were 239 items, separated by Winchell’s trademark three-period ellipses. Of these, 108 were “blind”—that is, no names were mentioned—and were therefore uncheckable. Bainbridge made every attempt to reach the subjects of the remaining 131. Among those he queried were Jimmy Durante, Al Smith, U.S. Senate Rules Committee chairman M. M. Neely, Rudy Vallee, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Beatrice Straight, Franz Boas, Louis Armstrong, Erich von Stroheim, French ambassador René Doynel de Saint-Quentin, George Raft, Martha Raye, Franchot Tone, and the chief of the Miami police. Responses poured back. Bainbridge found that sometimes Winchell got his facts straight. “The statement ‘Ethel Merman has purchased a beer baron’s yacht,’ made by Mr. Winchell in his column, is quite correct,” the diva informed him.
But others refuted Winchell’s sloppy reporting. In one column he announced, “The real reason [Leopold] Stokowski is feuding with The Theatre Authority is that its agent shouted at him: ‘How do you know? Some day they may have to run a benefit for you, and then you will need us!’ ” The conductor replied,
The statement of which you write is completely untrue. I have never had any “feud” with Theatre Authority. I have never had any dealings with them of any kind. No agent from them has ever “shouted” anything at me. There never has been any question of my conducting a benefit for the Theatre Authority. I belong to the American Federation of Musicians but I do not belong to the Theatre Authority because I am not an actor but a musician.
Claudette Colbert’s publicity people told Bainbridge that “the item regarding separation rumors on the actress and her physician-husband falls into your classification ‘c’—that is, completely inaccurate.” The secretary to the Japanese ambassador told Bainbridge that a Winchell item about his boss was “completely inaccurate and groundless.”
Bainbridge did the math on the 131 checkable items. It turned out that 53 were accurate, 24 were partially inaccurate, and devastatingly, 54 were completely inaccurate. “A large number of the flat statements Winchell makes in his column and on the radio are impossible to prove or disprove,” McKelway acknowledged. Nonetheless, he wrote, based on the sampling, “Winchell was not quite half right in the month of April.”
Armed with interviews, supporting material, and raw data, McKel-way retreated to the Foundation Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a sanitarium, to dry out and write his series. “This is a good place,” he told Ross. “It would have benefited Winchell in his youth, I think.” He emerged with a triumph. “There’s no use taking up your time with an encomium,” Shawn told Ross after reading McKelway’s results. “A magnificent piece, and that’s all there is to it.” He knew, though, that there would be a backlash: “God help McK and The New Yorker after publication.” Ross was uncharacteristically ambivalent about the tenor of the investigation. “My instinct is for blood, and more blood,” he told Shawn. “But I think McK’s alalytical [sic] tone here is the treatment. Probably far more effective than serious bitterness.”
Even in the first part, which gave a duly respectful nod to Winchell’s reach and power, there were hints of the shredding that was to come:
When Winchell is talking about himself, he demands the unwavering attention of his listeners. James Cannon, a former sportswriter and one of his closest friends, was in a restaurant one night with his girl and was joined by Winchell. Winchell started to talk about himself. He talked for ten minutes without interruption. Cannon began to wonder if his girl would enjoy the evening more if she had another drink. Keeping his eyes fastened on Winchell’s face so as to appear to be attentive, he said to his girl rapidly, “Honey, you want something?” Winchell stopped in the middle of a sentence and grabbed Cannon’s arm. “Jimmy!” he said reproachfully. “You’re not listening!”
Winchell read this and the succeeding installments with growing rage. By the fifth installment, McKelway—having tackled everything from Winchell’s impoverished childhood to his “continued friendship with gangsters”—reached the heart of his thesis: Winchell’s newspaper and radio items were often wildly erroneous, even “dreamy.” He cited instance after instance. Contrary to the columnist’s radio dispatch that “Buron Fitts, district attorney of Los Angeles County, is reported to have boarded a ship for an unknown destination,” McKelway found that Fitts “was sitting at the home of a friend with nine Los Angeles judges listening to Winchell’s news broadcast.” Without comment, McKelway recalled a 1937 Winchell item that stated that Hitler and Mussolini were no longer allies. He shot down Winchell’s wild story that E. B. White was the brother of the poet Elinor Wylie.
Ross himself might have written McKelway’s summation of Winchell’s approach:
Intrusiveness is the nature of journalism; it is its sharpest and most necessary instrument and it is also its most agonizing responsibility for journalists who choose to accept any responsibility at all. Intrusiveness is journalism’s power and its curse. Only taste and a sincere respect for accuracy can govern the power and remove the curse. Journalism is as complicated and as difficult as that. Winchell has no taste and he has no sincere respect for accuracy. If he had, he could not write gossip.
This was such explosive stuff that when McKelway sailed to South America on the eve of its publication, it was rumored that he had done so to escape the furor. Winchell responded to the assault with unconcealed malice, repeatedly attacking Ross in his column. Ross outwardly shrugged off the salvos. When Winchell reported that Ross did not wear undershorts, the editor merely stripped off the pair he had on and mailed them to the columnist. When Winchell managed to persuade Sherman Billingsley, the proprietor of his all-important base, the Stork Club, to bar Ross from the establishment, Ross told his staff that the snub was something he was doing “my best to take in my stride.”
But privately, Ross seethed. “[U]nder the compulsion of violent personal animus,” he said, Winchell was printing “slimy derogatory items” about him. The situation reached a head on June 21, 1942, when the gossip columnist excoriated Ross so viciously on the NBC Blue Network that Ross dispatched a three-page protest to its president, Mark Woods. Transcript in hand, Ross assailed the “vile and slanderous statements you have permitted to be shouted about me over the air waves of the continent”:
Winchell, in his broadcast, mentioned me, with the shrewd subtlety of the experienced character assassin, in juxtaposition with a group of infamous international heels, including the Nazis and “the Nazi hangman” [Reinhard] Heydrich, William Gerald Bishop, described as accused of trying to promote private armies for the overthrow of the government, Hans Von Stahremberg, the man who “did most of the printing for the German-American Bund and other Nazis” and George Sylvester Viereck.* The Nazis, Heydrich, Bishop, Von Stahremberg, Viereck—and Ross. Traitorous bastards all! Nice stuff, Mr. Woods.
When it came to tripping up subjects, Ross did not exempt his friends. Such was the case with his old army buddy Alexander Woollcott, who had had a profound influence on the early New Yorker. With its breezy, insider tone, his “Shouts and Murmurs” column was among the magazine’s most popular features, laden with tantalizing stories of sex, murder, and the like. Many of his entries were hoary and ancient. But in the early days, when Ross was sometimes hard pressed for copy, even the proper Katharine White admitted, “Woollcott could be absolutely depended on to produce a page that would be a divertissement for the magazine.”
At his height, Woollcott was a bona fide literary celebrity. As “The Town Crier” on CBS Radio clanging a bell and declaiming “Hear ye, hear ye!,” he would issue proclamations on current books to rapt listeners. He was a tireless lecturer, appearing occasionally in plays and becoming immortalized as the insufferable Sheridan Whiteside in the Kaufman-Hart classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. “Woollcott was, above all, a personality—a very theatrical personality,” recalled Danton Walker, one of his many secretaries. “His familiar first night entrances—galoshes open and flapping, scarf fluttering in the breeze he created—were frequently more dramatic than what occurred on stage.”
Eventually, however, the limelight and his own ego corrupted him. He was a shameless name-dropper, plugging the latest celebrity with whom he was fascinated. With little discrimination, he would endorse any product—automobiles, whiskey, tennis rackets—if the check was big enough and if the deal afforded him sufficient exposure. His taste was often downright moronic, perhaps deliberately so. He thought Lizzie Borden “America’s most interesting woman” and the folk rhyme about her ax murders “on the plane with Shakespeare and Sophocles.” Walt Disney’s Dumbo, he said, was “the best achievement yet reached in the Seven Arts since the first white man landed on this continent.” What excited Woollcott, White said, “was so capricious that it occasionally made even his best friends wince.” There also seemed to be no limit to his condescension. “By some miracle you have published a book which is not second rate,” he wrote Bennett Cerf. “Please send me twelve copies at once.”
The man’s ability to “write literately and fairly well and, above all, turn in clean copy,” Ross conceded, “was very rare.” But the thin-skinned critic hotly resisted editorial changes. He also took a perverse delight in sticking it to Ross. “At a dinner party where both were guests,” said Walker, “Ross complained that his amours were being gossiped about by members of his staff. Woollcott sprang at this: ‘No one,’ he shouted, ‘could tell more about your affairs than you do yourself!’ This so upset Ross that he retired to the bathroom and threw up.”
Such incidents, combined with Ross’s increasing intolerance for Woollcott’s peculiar prose, made a schism inevitable. Woollcott had become incredibly fussy about extending his deadlines, ever more resistant to editing, and much like O’Hara, consumed with his positioning in the magazine. Ross tried to placate him, to no avail. In 1934, after a showdown about a particularly racy “Shouts” column, Woollcott told Ross he was quitting. Fleischmann supported publishing the column; Ross was unimpressed. “That was, of course, Woollcott’s one hundredth resignation,” he told the publisher. “He always resigns under such circumstances. My opinion was merely that I certainly wouldn’t run his stale and off-color anecdotes if I owned the magazine.” He went on:
I’ve heard a vast and an alarming lot of complaint about Woollcott’s off-color anecdotes—people cutting them out of the magazine so the children wouldn’t see them and so on—and actually there is damned little doubt in my mind. . . . In any event I don’t think we ought to be bullied into running dirty stories if we don’t want to run them. And I would point out that Woollcott can’t get “five times as much for this stuff anywhere” because, pure as we are, we’re the most liberal magazine he can write for and he can’t print dirty stories anywhere. He doesn’t try it on the radio, either.
Around this time Woollcott became “forever the deadly enemy of The New Yorker.” Gibbs, meanwhile, had had his own fill of Woollcott. His editorial grudge dated to at least 1927, when he parodied Woollcott’s style in the North Hempstead Record, employing such phrases as “an attentive but somewhat croupy gathering.” He repeated the stunt in The New Yorker itself in 1935 with “Primo, My Puss,” which he couched as an account of Primo Carnera telling Woollcott how he had lost to Max Baer: “To return, however, to the ostensible purpose of these somewhat desultory memoirs, it was, I think, in the eleventh round of our considerably less than Homeric conflict that Mr. Baer, animated by a sudden and rather repulsive vivacity, visited upon your indignant correspondent a succession of blows which left him, for the moment at least, both breathless and passionately disinclined for further combat.”
Gibbs was frequently stuck with the thankless task of handling Woollcott’s copy. “He took on this weekly chore when I was on vacation or working from Maine or out sick,” recalled Katharine White. “I guess he had a harder time than I did because Aleck was ruder to men than to women.” By nature direct and terse, Gibbs hated Woollcott’s flaccid style. It was, he said, “sculptured from the very best Jello” and constituted a “terrible detriment of the English language.” Further, “As other men fear and hate the dentist’s drill, Mr. Woollcott is tortured by an unbalanced sentence. Adverbs and adverbial phrases (‘oddly enough’ is his favorite) and tender apostrophes to the reader (‘my blossom, ‘ ‘puss,’ and ‘my little dears’) are judiciously inserted until the magic equilibrium is achieved.”
Thus it was that Gibbs suggested to Ross, some four years after Woollcott had published his last “Shouts” column, that The New Yorker should undertake a Profile that would constitute a takedown of the egotistical raconteur. Woollcott, who for all his ostensible worldliness was easily hoodwinked, enthusiastically agreed. He invited Gibbs to come up to Neshobe Island, his retreat in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, to get “the flavor of his personality.” The eight-acre atoll was the site of storied croquet tournaments, nude swimming, parlor games, and other mandatory, full-throated activities with many of the Algonquin crowd. Many guests reveled in the experience. Others found Neshobe to be purgatory. “I was up there once and got claustrophobia, in spite of my analysis,” Frank Sullivan recalled. For his part, Gibbs declined Woollcott’s hospitality. REGRET CANT GET TO YOUR LAKE BUT HAVE MY OWN LIFE TO LIVE, he telegraphed.
As Gibbs exhumed Woollcott’s past and scrutinized his present, he and his subject became quite entangled. Sullivan recalled dining with them some three months before the piece was published:
High spot of the evening came when Aleck let loose one of his benevolent diatribes on Gibbs. He had been talking about himself, but every once in a while he would ask Gibbs a question quite casually and pretty soon, without Gibbs being aware of it, he was in possession of a complete history of Gibbs’ life including that first marriage to the brakeman’s daughter in Long Island.† Then Gibbs said something that displeased Aleck and the latter cut loose on him, reciting a litany of the shortcomings of his life, all highly accurate and easily remembered because they had just been painlessly imparted to Aleck by Gibbs himself. The look that came over Gibbs was worth the price of the dinner (which was paid for by Aleck anyhow), I must admit. . . . Gibbs says he likes Aleck. I don’t know whether that bodes well for the profile or not.
The result—titled “Big Nemo”—was a thorough dissection. Gibbs did not stint on Woollcott’s many personal kindnesses and tender heart. But he also dwelt at length on his improbable, even preposterous, life story. Gibbs conveyed his fractured rearing on the Phalanx commune in New Jersey. He noted his “bizarre” attendance at Hamilton, where he routinely “wore corduroy trousers and a turtle-necked sweater and topped them off with a jubilant red fez.” He related his conduct under fire in the Great War: “Other men dropped where they were, but Mr. Woollcott weighed close to two hundred pounds exclusive of hardware and his descent was gradual and majestic, like a slowly kneeling camel. Even when he had got safely down, he was still far from flat, and it is one of the miracles of the war that he came through it unperforated.” Describing Woollcott’s civilian appearance in evening clothes—complete with “a broad-brimmed black hat and flowing cape, carrying a heavy, silver-headed cane”—Gibbs adjudged that “on the whole he looked very much like Dracula.”
He recounted Woollcott’s slapdash journalism. “There could be no question that the Times’ new man could write very nicely, though in a strangely lacy and intricate fashion, but as a reporter he was exasperating,” Gibbs wrote. “He wasn’t exactly hostile to facts, but he was apathetic about them.” Woollcott was “sentimental, partisan, and maddeningly positive about everything even before he had been a critic long enough to know much about anything.”
Gibbs also disclosed one of the more embarrassing episodes of his subject’s career. It stemmed from an ostensible fan letter written by two elderly sisters in the vicinity of Albany. Though nearly destitute, they still owned a radio and on it they regularly listened to Woollcott, regarding him as “about the best thing in the world.” Moved by the flattery, Woollcott serenaded the sisters over the airwaves by having the studio orchestra play songs like “Home Sweet Home” and “Old Folks at Home.” Alas, it was not long before Woollcott was informed that both sisters had died within a week or so of each other. Woollcott earnestly sent forth inquiries about their identities, relatives, and any other relevant information. He came up empty, and no wonder: the unlikely yarn had all been an elaborate hoax, Gibbs reported, hatched by “a brooding author whose book Mr. Woollcott had dismissed too arrogantly as tripe.”
Incredibly, upon receipt of the first set of proofs, Woollcott telegrammed Gibbs YOU HAVE MADE ME VERY HAPPY WITH CERTAIN RESERVATIONS. He did dispatch a nine-page letter pointing out any number of factual errors and what he regarded as misinterpretations. Nonetheless, Woollcott acceded that Gibbs had rightly pointed up his many foibles: “I have on my conscience certain sins of omission which the years do not offace [sic] and for which I expect to pay in hell. They were the result of indolence, contemptible cowardice and black-hearted selfishness.”
When the three-part series appeared in March and April 1939, Woollcott was characteristically pleased by the publicity. His friends were not fooled. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so outraged by Gibbs’s treatment that they canceled their subscription to the magazine. It took time, but Woollcott gradually became aware that he had been had. He was especially distressed by Gibbs’s detailed recounting of the malefactions of an old army associate, Seth Bailey (disguised in print as “Sergeant Quirt”), a swindler on a grand scale. A naïve Woollcott had defended Bailey to the hilt, even pledging that “he would personally redeem every dollar’s worth of false checks that could be shown to have originated with his virtuous friend.” Confronted with several thousand dollars’ worth of proof that Bailey was indeed a con man, “Mr. Woollcott was obliged to retract his offer and leave the Sergeant to the mercy of the State of California.”
The Profile served as an excuse for a full Woollcott break with The New Yorker. After it appeared, he never printed another word in the magazine. And yet there followed a bizarre and protracted minuet of attempted and failed reconciliations. In 1942 Woollcott wrote Ross, “I’ve tried by tender and conscientious nursing to keep my grudge against you alive, but I find it has died on me.”
Actually, it didn’t; when Ross responded that he would be happy to visit him if he were up for it, Woollcott abruptly declined, citing the considerable “lying, cruelty and treachery” that accompanied the writing of the Profile. “For how much of this you were responsible and how much Gibbs, I am not sure,” Woollcott fumed, “but as long as I live I could never talk across a dinner table with you or even play a game of cribbage without wondering.”
Some months later Ross tried to mend the breach, assuring Woollcott that “I would be glad, God knows, to answer any questions you care to ask” in regard to Gibbs’s handiwork. Woollcott could not have cared less. “To me you are no longer a faithless friend,” he wrote from Neshobe. “To me you are dead. Hoping and believing I will soon be the same, I remain your quondam crony.” At “21” one evening, Woollcott literally refused to shake hands with Ross “and asked him to leave before he really started to tear loose on him.”
After Woollcott’s death in January 1943, Ross tried to puzzle out his complex friend. “All the time Alec wrote for us he was a trial—something of a nuisance and an embarrassment,” he told Woollcott’s biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams. “We had to fight to keep him printable, and he was harder to deal with than a Gila monster, which he sometimes resembled.”
Even in death, Woollcott haunted Ross. Following his demise, the Algonquin donated to the Authors’ Workshop for Veterans “a particularly monstrous lounging sofa” that Woollcott had favored, hoping that it might inspire the writing organization to new spiritual heights. When the workshop was forced to move to smaller quarters in 1947, a representative wrote Ross to ask if The New Yorker would be interested in having the furniture, humorously suggesting that Woollcott’s ghost would accompany it. The answer was no: “We don’t want any additional ghosts stalking the hall.”
Perhaps the best-known debunking in which Ross engaged—and certainly the project that not only made Gibbs’s name but would define his reputation—was a 1936 parody of Time magazine that doubled as a Profile of its maximum editor and publisher, Henry R. Luce.
The burgeoning Time Inc. enterprise was riding high in 1936. The year before, the corporation’s net profits had topped out at almost two and a quarter million dollars. Its holdings included Fortune magazine and the March of Time radio broadcasts and newsreels. The company would soon bring out the phenomenally successful picture magazine Life. Time itself, founded just two years before The New Yorker and instantly identifiable by its red-bordered cover, had become something of a national institution, with a circulation of 640,000. Its newsmagazine format—a comprehensive digest of national and international affairs, drawn mainly from newspapers across the country and supplemented by a small but growing network of correspondents—was revolutionary.
Time was also widely reviled. Intellectuals hated its condensation of the news, missing as it often did many of the finer points of important current events and framing unfolding stories with neat beginnings, middles, and endings. Devotees of objective journalism were astonished by Time’s sneaky bias in favor of the Republican Party and big business, its admiration of Mussolini, and its outright disgust with Communism. Members of the working press gnashed their teeth when they saw how Time’s editors appropriated and rewrote their copy without giving them credit. Provincial subscribers resented the magazine’s smug eastern establishment attitude, and its penchant for mongering rumors turned off upright readers. Sticklers for exactitude were frequently appalled at Time’s routine contempt for facts. As early as 1925, one reader had complained to the editors, “Time’s inaccuracies are chronic, flagrant and even self-evident.”
And purists of the English language hated the magazine’s jarring, often baffling assaults on their mother tongue. Time made a fetish of obscure words like tycoon, kudos, and pundit and invented others, like socialite. For quick identification, the magazine had perfected the art of the neat, often embarrassing epithet, such as “wild-eyed” President Francisco Madero of Mexico, “torpedo-headed dynamo” Walter P. Chrysler, “hen-shaped” New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and “duck-hunting dentist” Senator Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota. Time’s monikers frequently ran to the absurd. Football star Red Grange was an “eel-hipped runagade”; the prince of Monaco, a deep-sea diver, was a “bathysophical enthusiast”; and supporters of Prohibition were “adherents of aridity.”
The magazine’s prose was conveyed in a weirdly fractured form that flouted many of the conventional rules of grammar and usage. For expediency’s sake, the word and was often eliminated, with two-part thoughts mashed together via a comma or an ampersand. The article the was routinely jettisoned. The sentences themselves were often tortuously inverted and cluttered. “To Versailles (150 years ago) swarmed empurpled princelings, intent on an implicit mission of state,” was typical. So distinctive was this bizarre argot that it acquired its own neologism: “Timestyle.” Gibbs considered it “one of the great literary comedies of our time.”
Timestyle was the invention of the brilliant, boisterous Briton Hadden who, with his Yale classmate Luce, had created Time. Hadden was a brash product of the 1920s, a party animal complete with pocket flask and a flip disregard for everything holy. Among his specialties was exposing the embarrassing middle names of such public figures as the automobile manufacturer William Crapo Durant and Saturday Evening Post owner Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. By laying bare these and similar personal details, his cousin and Time writer John Martin said, the impish Hadden was “undressing them in Macy’s window.”
“Hadden had not set out to create a new style of writing,” wrote his biographer, Isaiah Wilner. But he did so out of the need for terseness and the reader’s attention alike. Long denied his place in Time history, Hadden was the true originator of the magazine. When he died, tragically, of a streptococcus infection early in 1929 at the age of thirty-one, Luce assumed the company mantle. Unlike the rambunctious Hadden, he was an empire builder, politically minded, personally abstemious, and an altogether cold fish—in short, perfect for debunking.
In its own way, Time was actually much like The New Yorker—urbane, snappy, and self-assured. “Naturally,” said David Cort, Life’s foreign editor, the two magazines “knifed each other at every opportunity.” But Ross, unlike Luce, had no particular political ax to grind. He was fanatical about accuracy and grammar. He also had a personal feud with Luce.
The feud began when Hadden saw a prepublication announcement for The New Yorker in 1925. Seizing on Ross’s famous declaration that his magazine would not be “edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” Hadden snorted to his writer Niven Busch, “Damn it, the old lady in Dubuque is smarter than they are. Dubuque is a great place and just as sophisticated as New York. That’s your angle, and make it plain that the magazine won’t last.” Busch’s subsequent slam at The New Yorker’s start-up, in Time’s March 2 issue, concluded with a suspiciously pat quote from an elderly woman in that quintessential small town: “The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity. They were quite correct, however, in their original assertion. The New Yorker is not for the old lady in Dubuque.”‡
More than anything else, it was a seventeen-page, full-blown look at The New Yorker in the July 1934 issue of Fortune that brought down Ross’s wrath. The author was Ross’s former right-hand man, Ralph Ingersoll, by this time a rapid climber of Luce’s corporate ladder. Ingersoll’s disclosure of juicy personal details about the magazine’s prime movers proved jolting. Ross’s face, Ingersoll wrote, was “made out of rubber which he stretches in every direction. Out of the lower half hangs a huge Hapsburg lip to which cigarettes stick. Widespread teeth diverge downward. . . . Ross’s eyes are fierce, shifty, restless.” Katharine White, he said, was “hard, suave, ambitious, sure of herself” and, being a woman, “may have recourse to tears.” Ingersoll exposed her husband as “shy, frightened of life, often melancholy, always hypochondriac,” while Thurber was “madder than White.” As for the “slim, handsome, macabre” Gibbs, “He hates everybody and everything, takes an adolescent pride in it. To a simple honest comment on life he is likely to snap ‘don’t be banal!’ ”
The piece hardly caught Ross off guard. Several months before its appearance, he had written Ingersoll, “Hadn’t you better show it to me to check for accuracy? I will promise not to try to soften the harshness, if any, but I do think you ought to get it right, and Fortune has made quite a few mistakes.” He even said, “I would love to have a chance to write it myself.” When the article finally hit the stands, Ross claimed he didn’t read it, even though “every wise guy in town is speaking about it, or writing, or something.” Still, he acknowledged, the story had “kicked up all sorts of unhappiness in subtle ways.” Part of that unhappiness arose because Ingersoll printed the salaries of many of The New Yorker’s leading lights, not always correctly. In response, Ross put a notice on the office bulletin board that read, “I do not make $40,000 a year.” By way of a potshot, White wrote a cryptic “Comment” entry that stated, “Gossip Note: The editor of Fortune makes thirty dollars a week and carfare.”
Ross was particularly mortified at how Ingersoll had dumped on The New Yorker’s art arrangements: “Some artists are good on drawings, weak on ideas. Arno is one and much of his reputation is founded on wit that is not his own. Nowadays The New Yorker gives Gluyas Williams all his ideas.” The barb so unsettled Williams that Ross reassured him, “Please stick with us, and please remember this: So help me, there’s no sin, no harm, and nothing unethical in drawing up an idea suggested by a man who can’t possibly draw it himself.”
In the spring of 1935, Ross began contemplating a counterattack. The project was initially assigned to Allene Talmey, an editor at Vanity Fair and Vogue, and it may even have been proposed by her. Requests for information were made. Ingersoll, no dummy, was naturally suspicious and tried to draw Ross out about what he really had in mind:
Thanks for your note telling us that the Luce Profile is a bona fide project. But what was all this you were telling me about on the telephone: that Miss Talmey was only a stooge, sent to us to get facts for someone else in the office to rewrite; that “someone who knows Luce well” (whose name you wouldn’t tell us because it might make us mad) was really going to do the job? Pardon my thinking it sounds like a gag.
God knows if the New Yorker feels like writing a Profile of Henry R. Luce there is nothing TIME INC can do about it. And we are all journalists together. Why the comic opera intrigue?
Come clean, pal, with (a) who’s going to write the piece, (b) our rights in the matter of checking the factual contents, and (c) just what sort of a hearing, if any, we are entitled to at the trial of Mr. Luce and his magazines in print, and we will get down to cases.
The project was shelved for a while, likely in an attempt to elude Ingersoll’s skepticism. Gibbs came into the picture after Katharine White suggested a parody of Fortune by way of retaliation. McKelway shifted the focus to a parody of Time “because nobody but business executives who are being written up and ambitious dentists ever see Fortune, much less read it.” And he nominated Gibbs as the best man to undertake “such an antic job.”
Apart from his unflattering depiction in Fortune, Gibbs had no personal quarrel with Luce. But he did hold a grudge against some of the publisher’s people, including his second wife, Clare Boothe Brokaw. As ambitious in her own way as her husband, Clare had been an editor at Vanity Fair before she met Luce and was eager for freelance assignments. One day in 1931 she called up Gibbs to ask him over for drinks. Thinking he was being invited to a cocktail party, Gibbs responded in the affirmative—only to discover that he was the only guest. This was a familiar tactic for Clare. She would routinely have an editor over to her penthouse on Beekman Place and, “after giving him a cocktail, would inform him that she had a little time on her hands and thought it might be fun to dash off some articles for his magazine.” In Gibbs’s case, she suggested a Profile of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, doing so with considerable snootiness. “Write that down,” she told him. “Here, I’d better spell it for you.” Gibbs was especially put off by her remark, “You Americans like your drinks sweet, don’t you?,” coming as it did from a fellow countryman. “This was the Vogue influence,” he concluded. “Hanging around with foreigners or something.”
The Luce endeavor gelled throughout 1936. Ingersoll remained dubious and tried to dissuade Luce from cooperating. “The fewer facts you give them,” he said, “the less they’ll have to twist to your discomfort.” At one point he implored his boss, “They hate you over there. They’ll take long knives and cut you into little pieces and put you over a fire.” But Luce, as a fellow journalist, felt obliged to respond to The New Yorker’s inquiries. Anyway, his ego would not allow him to avoid being featured in one of the country’s most prestigious publications.
“It became an office project, the like of which I’d never seen,” said McKelway of the Profile. The “Talk” staff dug up facts, and McKelway interviewed Luce in “deadpan manner,” giving no hint that a bushwhacking was under way. Nor did he mention Gibbs, who had by this time acquired a reputation as a satirist. The background material included Talmey’s preliminary research and the testimony of more than a dozen Time employees who were only too happy to pull the pants off their boss. Eugene Kinkead, an enterprising young New Yorker reporter, supplied some key facts. After Luce assured McKelway that he had leased the “smallest apartment in River House” at 435 East 52nd Street, dismissing it as a modest dwelling of four or five rooms, Kinkead somehow managed to wangle his way in. He discovered that the wealthy Luce was in possession of a grand assemblage of fifteen rooms and five baths.
Armed with a mass of information, Gibbs started writing, employing his natural wit and acid to weave a seamless send-up. When necessary, he improvised. Lacking the weekly salary of the average “Timemployee,” he ran his index finger across the top row of his typewriter keys to arrive at the figure of $45.67890. Ross protested, “Look, this is too damned obvious. They’ll get wise to it.” So Gibbs changed the number to $45.67802. Though hardly accurate, the preposterous amount was a perfect touch for a satire. So sly was Gibbs’s fictional accounting that the credulous critic Dwight Macdonald, who then worked for Fortune, later cited the $45.67802 tally as evidence that Luce had sweated his labor.
The resulting 4,500 words, running in the November 28 issue and titled “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life. . . . Luce,” constituted a tour de force for Gibbs and The New Yorker alike. The peg was the launch of Life. “Sad-eyed last month was nimble, middle-sized Life-President Clair Maxwell as he told newshawks of the sale of the fifty-three-year-old gagmag to Time,” the piece began. The first issue, Gibbs wrote, “pictured Russian peasants in the nude, the love life of the Black Widow spider, referred inevitably to Mrs. Ernest Simpson.”
Following some background on the sale of the old Life title to the Luce gang and its reincarnation as a picture magazine, Gibbs struck with his nut graph: “Behind this latest, most incomprehensible Timenterprise looms, as usual, ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce, co-founder of Time, promulgator of Fortune, potent in associated radio & cinema ventures.”
From the first sentence to the last, the piece was an all-out assault on Timestyle.§ “Sitting pretty are the boys,” “In a quandary was Bridegroom Luce,” “Doomed to strict anonymity are Time-Fortune staff writers,” and “Shotup [as opposed to “upshot”] of this was that Luce, embarrassed, printed a retraction” were representative thrusts. Paragraph after merciless paragraph rammed home the point:
“Tycoon,” most successful Timepithet, had been coined by Editor Laird Shields Goldsborough; so fascinated Hadden with “beady-eyed” that for months nobody was anything else. Timeworthy were deemed such designations as “Tom-tom” Heflin, “Body-lover” Macfadden.¶
“Great word! Great word!” would crow Hadden, coming upon “snaggle-toothed,” “pig-faced.” Appearing already were such maddening coagulations as “cinemaddict,” “radiorator.” Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Always mentioned as William Randolph Hearst’s “great & good friend” was Cinemactress Marion Davies, stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the “cozy hospitality” of Mae West. Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.
Countering Time’s neologisms, Gibbs concocted some of his own, tossing off the March of Time as “Cinemarch” and Luce’s personal assets as his “Lucemolument.” Gibbs even described McKelway, though not by name, as a “Newyorkereporter.” And he tore into the “cold, baggy, temperate” Luce himself.
At work today, Luce is efficient, humorless, revered by colleagues; arrives always at 9:15, leaves at 6, carrying armfuls of work, talks jerkily, carefully, avoiding visitor’s eye; stutters in conversation, never in speechmaking. . . . Prone he to wave aside pleasantries, social preliminaries, to get at once to the matter in hand. Once to interviewer who said, “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” snapped Luce, “Well, you are.” . . . He drinks not at all at midday, sparingly at all times, sometimes champagne at dinner, an occasional cocktail at parties.
In the best Time tradition, the piece was sprinkled with such three-dollar words as jocosities, necromancy, and transmogrified. Similarly, it was laced with odd and arresting footnotes. A reference to a recent issue of Fortune weighing “as much as a good-sized flounder” was asterisked thusly: “Two pounds, nine ounces.” When Gibbs noted in a humdrum passage given over to annual earnings that Time Inc.’s net profits had dropped more than $200,000 in 1932 from the year before, he jotted at the bottom of the page, “Hmm.”#
Gibbs attacked the Lucean brand of fact gathering: “Typical perhaps of Luce methods is Fortune system of getting material. Writers in first draft put down wild gossip, any figures that occur to them. This is sent to victim, who indignantly corrects the errors, inadvertently supplies facts he might otherwise have withheld.” In deference to Ingersoll’s Fortune piece, Gibbs printed the salaries, known or assumed, of a number of key Time Inc. executives, along with their personality quirks. Not content with mentioning Ingersoll’s $30,000 paycheck and $40,000 stock income, Gibbs sketched him as “Burly, able, tumbledown Yaleman Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, former Fortuneditor, now general manager of all Timenterprises, descendant of 400-famed Ward McAllister. Littered his desk with pills, unguents, Kleenex, Socialite Ingersoll is Time’s No. 1 hypochondriac, introduced ant palaces for study & emulation of employees, writes copious memoranda about filing systems, other trivia, seldom misses a Yale football game.”
Gibbs finished with a grandiloquent Timestyle flourish: “Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-eight, his fellowman already informed up to his ears, the shadow of his enterprises long across the land, his future plans impossible to imagine, staggering to contemplate. Where it all will end, knows God!”
Ostensibly in the interests of accuracy and courtesy, and certainly in the cause of revenge served cold, proofs of the piece were dispatched to Ingersoll. A couple of hours later, he telephoned McKelway. “Hearst tactics!” he shouted. “Time-Life was in an uproar about it; there was a continuous procession of people in and out of Mrs. White’s office,” recalled the newly arrived William Maxwell. “I sat taking in snatches of the excitement.”
Ingersoll insisted that he and Luce meet with Ross that night. Drawing out the drama, McKelway replied that Ross had a dinner party going on. Why not make it tomorrow? Ingersoll persisted, and so it was arranged that the four men would meet at Ross’s penthouse at 22 East 36th Street at 11:30 p.m. “Bulls like to fight,” said a weary New Yorker staff member.
What followed was one of the most infamous intramural dust-ups in journalistic history. “Oh, that terrible night,” Luce said years later. “I should never have gone over. Ingersoll dragged me there.” For reasons not entirely clear, Gibbs was not present. According to Ingersoll, “[He] lost his nerve and didn’t show. He hid out in some bar and got telephoned flashes from McKelway.” By another account, Ross excused him as “a man of weak character” who would likely cave in to Luce’s protests. Yet another story had Ross keeping him out of the fracas “on the grounds that no author should be subjected to such a strain.”
When Ingersoll and Luce arrived at Ross’s apartment, McKelway recalled, “Luce came straight across the room to me (he remembered me from the interviews) and said in a kind of whine, ‘It’s not true that I have no sense of humor.’ I thought it was one of the most humorless remarks I’d ever heard.”
And so it went. Luce stammered; Ross punctuated his retorts with refrains of “goddamn.” Guaranteeing to heighten the tension, liquor was brought out. McKelway and Ingersoll freely partook, the virtuous Luce restricted himself to one drink (“making a valiant effort to get it down without gagging”), and the ulcer-ridden Ross abstained completely. The four quickly proceeded to spar, Luce and Ingersoll picking apart the proofs line by line, Ross and McKelway vigorously defending their material. Less important than any particular set of facts was Gibbs’s overall theme. Luce wailed, “There isn’t a single constructive thing in the whole piece.”
“We didn’t set out to do a constructive piece,” Ross told him. “We simply tried to do a fair piece.” Regarding Ross unbelievingly, a stunned Luce exclaimed, “Fair!” and shook his head, apparently resigned to a public crucifixion. Beseeching Ross again that the Profile contained nothing positive, Ross replied, “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon.” An exasperated Luce managed to sputter, “But God damn it, Ross, this whole God damn piece is ma-ma-malicious.” Ross agreed. “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”
Among the many points to which Luce objected was Gibbs’s merciless recalling of how Clare’s drama Abide with Me had opened to disastrous reviews just a few days before she married the baby tycoon. Gibbs quoted verbatim a devastating passage by the New York Herald Tribune’s theater critic, Richard Watts, who had written that an overeager Clare had taken a curtain call in response to apparently nonexistent cries of “Author!” Clare, Watts said, “must have been crouched in the wings for a sprinter’s start.” Luce complained, “We didn’t mention your wife in Fortune.” That gave Ross pause. He beckoned McKelway to follow him into the foyer and asked, “Did they mention my wife?” McKelway shrugged. “I can’t say. I never read the damn piece all the way through.” Ross agreed to downgrade the anecdote to a footnote—thereby guaranteeing that it would receive even more attention.
Luce seized on the absurd $45.67802 weekly salary figure, arguing that it was “far, far too low” and did not account for the Time Inc. mail clerks in Chicago. Lying through his gapped front teeth, Ross insisted, “That figure was arrived at only after the most painstaking research. We’ve checked it and rechecked it and we have every reason to believe that it’s accurate.” When Luce declared that another tally was “completely, absolutely wrong,” Ross replied mildly, “Wrong? Perhaps. Perhaps it is—but that, after all, is part of the parody of Time.”
That set Ingersoll off. He began shouting that the whole undertaking had been conducted under false pretenses and repeated his charge that it was in the worst Hearst tradition. A self-assured McKelway suggested that this was altogether appropriate for a portrait of Hearst’s heir apparent. At that, “Ingersoll sprang from his chair and was advancing menacingly toward McKelway when Luce suddenly reached out, put his hand on his aide’s head, and pressed him gently back.” On that violent note the inconclusive, ill-conceived gathering wrapped up at about three a.m. A sodden Ingersoll leaned on Luce in getting out the door. Luce, looking crushed, may well have been blotto himself, giving the lie to Gibbs’s assertion that he rarely imbibed.
A few days later Ross composed a remarkable five-page single-spaced letter to Luce that more fully set out the rationale for the tone and content of Gibbs’s Profile. He prefaced it by stating, “The article went to your office in the form it did as a gag, a malicious playfully vindicative [sic] gag, from a gagmag. Ingersoll, with lofty arrogance, made this office sweat to the last drop when he could and we thought we would open his pores up. We did not foresee that you also would join him in the steamroom, but that just made the gag better.”
His preliminaries out of the way, Ross disposed of Luce’s objections. He disputed the publisher’s claim that Gibbs hadn’t written a single nice word about him. On the contrary: “It was generally felt that the total effect of the article and its being in existence at all were enormously favorable, and that our listing of your remarkable growth, the figures themselves, were complimentary in the highest degree, presenting you, in fact, as practically heroic.”
In addition to many other points, Ross defended the use of the Watts quote “as being exactly the kind of item Time would pick up and use itself.” He similarly defended a paragraph that dwelt on Luce’s future plans, including a possible run for public office. “Vehemently denies this Luce, denies any personal political ambition,” Gibbs had written. “It was regarded,” Ross explained, “as exactly the kind of thing Time is doing constantly: denying the weird and, as we call it, ‘grotesque,’ rumor after starting it, thereby getting the full news value of it.** Moreover Time enterprises are always speculating on people’s ambitions.” As for the disclosure about the palatial dimensions of the River House digs—which Luce was then subletting—Ross pointed out that Kinkead had dug up a real estate advertisement that accurately described the size of the space: “You are offering the place for rent as a fifteen-room apartment, a pretty state of affairs if it isn’t true.”
Threaded throughout this missive were Rossian thoughts on journalistic ethics. “I was astonished to realize the other night that you are apparently unconscious of the notorious reputation Time and Fortune have for insult,” he wrote.†† “I say frankly but really in a not unfriendly spirit, that you are in a hell of a position to ask anything.” He also quoted from a memo that Gibbs had previously written him about the whole sordid undertaking:
I think Time has gratuitously invaded the privacy of a great many people; I think it draws conclusions unwarranted by the facts, distorts quotes, reprints conclusions unwarranted by the facts, reprints rumors it knows have little foundation, uses a form of selective editing in getting together a story from the newspapers that throws it altogether out of focus, and that Timestyle is an offense to the ear. I said that Mr. Luce was humorless because I could find nothing in the source or in the reports of people who had talked to him that indicated anything else. Also I doubt very much if a humorist would last a week as president of Time, Inc. I’m not even sure that “humorless” is a disparaging term. In any case all statements and editorial conclusions in the piece are matters of honest opinion with me, usually made after reading the evidence of a great many people. Don’t know if Ingersoll and Luce realize just how much source material went into this thing, and from what widely divergent people it came. In almost every case I’ve tried to follow the most temperate estimate, throwing out a lot of stuff that would have made the boys’ hair stand up.
Ross wound up with a body slam:
After our talk the other night I asked at least ten people about Time and, to my amazement, found them bitter, in varying degrees, in their attitude. You are generally regarded as being as mean as hell and frequently scurrilous. Two Jewish gentlemen were at dinner with me that night and, upon mention of Time, one of them charged that you are anti-Semitic, and asked the other if he didn’t think so too. The other fellow said he’d read Time a lot and he didn’t think you were anti-Semitic especially; you were just anti-everything, he said—anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Scandinavian, anti-black-widow spider. “It is just their pose,” he said.
Ross signed this marathon dispatch “Harold Wallace Ross” and appended the words “Small man . . . furious . . . mad . . . no taste”—all of them epithets that Time Inc. had previously applied to him. The whole “childish” matter was now over, Ross said.‡‡ But there was no way that so bloody a feud could expire easily. A characteristically sour Luce shot back:
Thank you for your letter of November 23. It was not “up to you” to make any explanations so far as I was concerned, but in any case I wanted to thank you for the personal trouble you took with the Time-Luce parody.
Of course I regret you felt it necessary to print that Richard Watts quote. I only regret that Mr. Gibbs did not publish all he knew so that I might learn at once how mean and poisonous a person I am.
Mr. Gibbs, like you, is undoubtedly sick of the whole subject. But, having located a poison more or less at large in society, he may perhaps like to help mitigate it. And this, I assure you, he can do if he will take any current copy of TIME and red-pencil every example of “cruelty, scandal-mongering and insult”—and send it to me.
It has been widely reported that Gibbs’s barbed treatment managed to kill off Timestyle in one fell swoop, and that after the parody appeared, nobody at Time would dare employ it again. This is far from the truth. Thanks in part to Gibbs, much of Time’s prose did become noticeably less wacky. But many of its affectations—dropped articles, colorful descriptives, and especially, inherent biases—lingered for years.
Still, there was no arguing with what Gibbs had accomplished. For once, Alexander Woollcott’s enthusiasms were in order when he personally wrote Gibbs that his masterwork was “the most creditable thing that magazine has ever printed. Its publication renews my enthusiasm for the magazine and its guile as a piece of parody fills me with envy and admiration.” In Harper’s, Bernard DeVoto declared that Gibbs had executed “the most distinguished public service of American journalism in 1936.” By one reckoning, the Luce issue was only the second number of The New Yorker that had sold out. (The previous one, in 1934, had been given over largely to a parody of Punch, titled “Paunch.”) Winchell reported a rumor—which he probably started—that Luce had descended on The New Yorker’s offices on Thanksgiving to personally beat Gibbs up, only to find that the place was closed for the holiday.
Ross considered the spoof “one of the best pieces ever run by a magazine, unquestionably, and my part in it was satisfying and wholesome.” And he patted Gibbs on the back with the circulation figures to prove it:
There is no doubt the Luce piece did something. . . . The issue of Nov. 14th, two weeks ahead of Luce sold 140,000. Nov. 21st was down to 138,000 and then Luce makes 141,000. That broke the record, but the next issue broke it again; sold 144,000. The plain fact is that the Luce Profile not only broke a season’s record for the issue in which it appeared, but continued with the next issue and broke the record again. A peculiar, but gratifying effect.
Inevitably, the scrapping would continue. Less than a month after the parody appeared, The New Yorker ran a “Funny Coincidence Department” note that effectively accused Fortune of plagiarizing an item from Magazine Digest. Actually, the original had appeared in Fortune, prompting its managing editor, Eric Hodgins, to declare, “I find it hard to dissociate anything the New Yorker does these days from venality.” When Hodgins told Ross about the mistake, and Ross fired back an impolitic response, Ingersoll told him, “The river looks very tempting this afternoon. I suggest—not entirely facetiously—that you go over and jump into it.” In a subsequent “Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse,” The New Yorker apologized grudgingly, stating that the matter seemed only “to be partially set in order.”
In 1937 Life published a photo of Ross enhanced by the famed caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who drew sinister eyebrows and a bushy mustache on Ross’s grinning face to transform him into a dead ringer for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In 1938 Ingersoll mischievously added the name of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker’s dandyish symbol, to Time’s masthead. After keeping the name there awhile, Ingersoll planned to drop it and explain that Tilley had been fired. But when Corey Ford, who had named Tilley, threatened to sue, Ingersoll abandoned the plan.
In 1940 a flap ensued when Freddie Packard supposedly sent a telegram to Hodgins that inquired DOES THE PRESENT MRS LUCE WEAR BLACK UNDERWEAR. Packard said he wasn’t responsible and may well not have been; his first and middle initials were erroneously rendered as “R H.” In any event, some months later Margaret Case Harriman published a two-part Profile of Clare titled “The Candor Kid” that began, “Once upon a time, in a far country called Riverside Drive, a miracle child was born and her name was Clare Boothe. Over her cradle hovered so many good fairy godmothers that an S.R.O. sign was soon put up at the foot of the crib.” Shawn was delighted. “As for Harriman’s bitchy tone,” he wrote, “I think it’s perfect; amounts to doing Boothe in her own terms, much as Gibbs did Luce in Timestyle.”§§ In 1945 Charles Morton published in The New Yorker a casual that made sport of Time’s burgeoning editorial roster, predicting that at some point Luce would be anointed “Exalted Supreme Editor-in-Chief.”
Gibbs himself was happy to keep stoking the antagonism, almost to the point of exhaustion. In 1938 he gleefully noted in “Comment” that clerical workers, researchers, and writers for Fortune (“probably the third heaviest magazine in the English language”) had been ordered to report to their desks by nine, nine-thirty, and ten a.m., respectively. In 1940 he reported that Life had conquered its struggle “to figure out a way to print a picture of a living, breathing woman with absolutely no clothes on” while making a significant cultural statement in the process. “They merely photographed a life class at the Yale Art School. This had Yale, it had Art, it had Class, it had America; it had everything, including no clothes on.” There was also a Gibbbsian “Comment” from 1944 that described a Time Inc. worker who swore that one day he would destroy Luce’s all-omniscient construct by shouting down its hallways, “I don’t know!” Gibbs’s subject summed up, “The whole damn thing will just come tumbling down.”
Gibbs further published a casual called “Beauty and Gutzon Borglum” that was based very closely on his uncomfortable 1931 encounter with Clare. Disguising her as the “very beautiful and strange” Myrna Haskell, he concluded the vignette by having his alter ego exit Clare’s apartment in a daze: “As he rode down Madison Avenue, he thought somewhat about the well-known sculptor but mostly about Miss Haskell’s mind. For some reason he was never able to explain, it made him think of confetti.”
“Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” may have been played for laughs, but Ross remained deadly serious about Luce and what he regarded as a truly dangerous enterprise. “Time is terrifying, and ought to be put out of business but it gets more powerful daily,” he wrote Martha Gellhorn at the height of World War II. “If Clare isn’t president Henry will be, and I’ll probably get run out of the country.” He subsequently told Gellhorn, “If either of the Luces become president I positively will leave the country and your suggestion of Cuba sounds fine. One or the other of them may make the White House if they don’t tear each other to pieces on some occasion before they get there. I think they are the two most ambitious people I have ever encountered.” In a lighter vein, Ross sent around a memo that recommended abandoning the use of the word understandably. He explained, “I saw it in Life the other day, and when Life takes up a word, it is time for us to unload, I think.”
Luce eventually dismissed the Profile but he could never quite elude it. Two years after its appearance, a condensed version ran in Scholastic magazine. Long after that, when Luce was at Rollins College in Florida to make a speech, he decided to drop in on a class in contemporary biography. “And what do you suppose the class was discussing?” he complained. “Me! And what do you suppose they were using as their text? That goddamn article in The New Yorker! So now my question is, Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?”
Curiously, Gibbs would have his own mild rapprochement with Luce. In 1946 he published a piece about Ethel Merman in Life, evoking at least one complaint of disloyalty. Two years later, when Ross accepted but killed a twelve-thousand-word Profile that Gibbs had written of Noël Coward, Gibbs returned to Life to peddle it. But he insisted that it not be cut, edited, or otherwise molested. Gibbs knew that those were impossible terms and practically dared the editor Robert Coughlan to reject the piece. “This brings me to money,” Gibbs wrote, “about which in many ways I am a son of a bitch. If, by some miracle, like Luce dropping dead, you wanted to print it in two parts I’m afraid I’d want a price that would make everybody drop dead.” The Coward story was never printed.
Gibbs would come to feel a strange ambivalence toward the parody. Privately, he was pleased to have given Time a well-deserved comeuppance and was gratified by the praise and the controversy. Over the years, though, he grew tired of having the piece being remembered above everything else he had written, especially when anyone quoted—or just as frequently, misquoted—its most deathless line. When Henry Holt anthologized the spoof in More in Sorrow, Gibbs confided to Thurber, “I wanted to change ‘the famous profile on Luce’ to ‘the ill-advised,’ etc., and they are still trying to figure out what to make of that.”
Just the same, Gibbs stood by his work. Some twenty years after “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” appeared, he considered expanding it. He resisted the temptation.
It seemed to me at first that Mr. Luce’s career ought to be brought up to date, but my second, and final, decision was that this would be superfluous, not because of the extra effort involved, a matter naturally of small concern to me, but because whatever changes have taken place in him have had to do with increasing celebrity and scope rather than any fundamental shifting of personality. It is obvious that Mr. Luce occupies a more obtrusive position in the nation than he did in 1935 [sic], but I see no reason to suppose that he is a different man.
* George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962), a German American writer and Nazi propagandist, was imprisoned by the State Department for five years.
† Sullivan was apparently unaware that Helen Galpin was the daughter of a butler. Many others also believed that her father had worked on the Long Island Rail Road, including Brendan Gill, who said so in his memoir of The New Yorker. It is not known how this misconception arose.
‡ Not long afterward Busch left Time and met with Ross. “I wish you would do something for me,” Ross told him. “Find out who was the stinker who wrote that snide article about The New Yorker.” “I did,” Busch confessed, whereupon Ross hired him.
§ One scholarly study determined that the Profile contained, among its other features, “51 full verb inversions, 12 quotations inversions (all verbs of quotation are inverted)” and “3 structures in which the predicate comes before the subject without a verb (‘most brilliant he,’ ‘handicapped he’).”
¶ Senator James Thomas Heflin (1869–1951) of Alabama, also known as “Cotton Tom,” was a leading advocate of white supremacy. The nationally known fitness enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955) published a successful string of magazines.
# Seven decades later Ross’s private secretary William Walden recalled, “I thought that was the funniest footnote I’d ever read. I really roared.”
** Actually, Gibbs had called the rumor not “grotesque” but “fantastic.”
†† In a portion of the letter that Ross struck from the final draft, there ensued after that sentence the following: “I would remind you that in the article in Fortune, for instance, you called Mrs. White a simple, sensitive gentlewoman, ‘hard, suave, ambitious, sure of herself.’ . . . ‘She handles people smoothly, with a carefully studied courtesy and tact’ . . . ‘shrewd and able politically.’ It is, so help me Christ, a positive crime that such a thing should have been printed, although the statements are so extreme as to be ridiculous and, like all such, are, partially at least, self-discounting. (You had her ‘eloping’ with White in the original draft; nice for her children.) Arno was ‘losing his grip,’ a damaging accusation in an artist’s life. Gibbs was accused of responding to all simple, honest statements by saying ‘Don’t be banal,’ a word which up to that time I am certain he never used in his life. I was ‘. . . not a large man (in the mental, not the physical sense), but a furious and a mad one.’ I was ‘without taste, either literary or good’. I ‘. . . was cruel and largely unnecessary. . . .’ ‘Elwyn Brooks White sold the only painting he ever made to The New Yorker’s art board, on which his wife sits.’ Damned if we aren’t criminally corrupt, among other things.”
‡‡ Frank Crowninshield, the former editor of Vanity Fair, thought Ross’s response was “a gem of the purest ray.”
§§ As part of an attempt to garner favorable coverage of her former plantation in Charleston, which had in the interim become a monastery, Clare told Ross shortly before his death that The New Yorker had “fulfilled its mission of laughter, which always provides a great tonic for the unnecessary miseries our human nature visits on itself.” Apparently ignorant of Diogenes, she added, “A good friend of mine once said: ‘It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.’ You’ve lit lots of gay little candles in the gloom, bless you!”